


The Dark and Light Along the Sea

by InitialA



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Emma Swan, Dark One Captain Hook | Killian Jones, F/M, kind of because it's really just... all kinds of messed up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:28:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22652527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InitialA/pseuds/InitialA
Summary: Once upon a time, a little girl was stolen from a castle in the dead of night. She’d been born with magic, you see, and that magic was coveted by dark forces across the land.Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a woman. This happens often enough, you see, but this particular woman was already married.Once upon a time, a monster fell in love with a witch...
Relationships: Captain Hook | Killian Jones/Emma Swan
Comments: 7
Kudos: 72





	The Dark and Light Along the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Artwork by allons-y-to-hogwarts-713 on Tumblr!!

Once upon a time, a little girl was stolen from a castle in the dead of night. She’d been born with magic, you see, and that magic was coveted by dark forces across the land. She knew she’d been stolen, because the woman she’d been forced to call Mother told her often while complaining about how much food she ate and the cost of clothing to keep her warm. Mother taught the little girl how to use her magic, though the kinds of spells she learned felt  _ wrong  _ \-- slimy under her skin and a cold draft down her back with each success.

Mother didn’t like hearing that it felt wrong. The more the little girl spoke about the wrong feeling, the more she was forced to train, drowning in the feeling of wrongness until one day, finally, she snapped.

Mother looked like a doll that had been thrown across the room, her limbs at odd angles, her head bent uncomfortably.

The little girl, not so little these days, left without looking back.

She traveled far, searching for  _ something  _ to ease the knot of terrible feelings in her belly. Voices whispered in her mind after night fell, echoes of Mother twisting anxiety into her heart and others she couldn’t name leading her to fear she was going mad.

Seasons passed and her search remained fruitless. She grew tall and fair, slim from traveling the realm on foot, and earned her way through performing the only bits of magic she dared: illusion. She could turn a bushel of apples into a basket of snakes and back again, pull a dove from a child’s pocket, make coins vanish and reappear in her shoes. She stayed until the whispers in her mind became real in her ears, suspicious villagers or townsmen who looked a little too long at the traveling magic maid, then took off down the road, still searching for something that felt like peace.

One night, years later, the magic maid found herself in quiet port town; quite the oxymoron, she inquired at the inn as to why this wasn’t the bustling pirate haven or trading port she was used to.

“The Dark One, miss,” the old barkeep told her, setting before her a trencher of bread filled with a thick stew made from potatoes and ham and a mug of watered down ale. “Claimed the castle up the way. Doesn’t much bother us townsfolk, but his presence bothers outsiders. Anyone as wants to trade here comes and does his business quickly, then sails out again on the next tide. As fer pirates, rumor is the Dark One used to be one hisself and knows their treachery. Forbids it, see, less someone else comes to try and claim his power.”

She thought about his story as she ate slowly. She’d heard of the Dark One before, mostly as a bedtime story from Mother to warn her about how people would want to use her power for their own. The last Dark One, Rumplestiltskin, had apparently vanished a few hundred years ago and no one had seen concrete proof of his successor. Yet, allegedly, he was here, in this out of the way town, living amicably beside a town that didn’t seem to care he was there. Then again, she mused, if they’d all grown up knowing he was there and hadn’t done anything before, they probably didn’t see a need to feel afraid of him. And if it kept trouble away, all the better for them.

People around these parts, she discovered, turned in early; she considered herself lucky for having made so much coin in the last town since there would be scant opportunities for her to sing for her supper. She paid up front for two nights at the inn, giving herself a chance to rest and maybe find a cobbler to fix her boots before going somewhere without the Dark One’s shadow looming overhead. Trying not to count and recount the coins left in her purse, she retired early as well, looking forward to a night indoors with a soft bed. Maybe, she thought with a wry smile, mice and bugs would be terrified of the Dark One too, and she’d have a peaceful rest.

The candle was unlit when she got to her room, and she scowled, fumbling in the dark for the flint and steel she kept in her pouch. Sparks flew as she tried to light it, cursing under her breath the whole while; she wasn’t good at using this stupid thing for small fires, she could barely do it for a campfire out on the road-- “Why do you use that thing?” a male voice asked, the candle wick flaming to life.

She whirled, conjuring a fireball in one hand and ready to burn whoever dared come for her in the night. “Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing here?”

“Interesting questions,” the man replied, waving his hand carelessly. Her fireball vanished and she felt like the air was being squeezed from her lungs. “Some might call me hell incarnate. Others simply call me by my more colorful moniker.”

Several other candles lit around the room, giving her a better view of the man before her. He dressed simply, in either dark colors or simply black, with a long leather greatcoat and heavy boots. A hook where his left hand should have been glinted wickedly in the light. His hair fell rakishly over his forehead and one eye, slightly disheveled and looking like it had been some time since its last wash. But it was his piercing blue eyes that caught hold of her, red-rimmed and exhausted as they were, watching her with cautious interest. “The Dark One,” she said faintly.

“Ah, so you’ve heard of me. No need to answer that, I know all about your little chat with the barman downstairs. I’ve got ears and eyes all over this town, looking for people such as yourself to cross into my territory.”

“People like me?”

“ _ Magic _ , love,” the Dark One said, his heavy footfalls echoing around the room as he came closer. “I could practically smell your magic the moment you crossed the border of this little place,” he continued, leaning in and breathing her in to prove his point. “Never before have I met anyone with as much raw power as you.”

She shivered, her magic reacting to him in a way that made her hair stand on end. It  _ liked  _ him and that frightened her -- her magic barely liked  _ her _ , leaving her with those terrible feelings when Mother had trained her, fighting from her control every time she tried to use it to light a fire or performing for her own survival. She felt it wrenching from her control even now, reaching for him and twining about him like a cat. “Interesting indeed,” the Dark One murmured. “What’s your name, love?”

Mother had drilled in many things to her over the years: don’t eat so much, stop growing so fast, stop being ungrateful for the roof over your head, listen only to Mother, never do any sort of magic without exacting a price, never give anyone your name lest they have power over you. She hesitated now, and his eyes hardened. “Your  _ name _ ,” he said again, and she felt his power squeezing her, forcing her to obey his will.

She closed her eyes and forced her magic out, against his and whatever hold he was trying to put on her. He flew back, stopping just before he hit the wall, and when she opened her eyes again she took some satisfaction from the infuriated look on his face. “You have no power here, Dark One,” she said firmly.

But, just as quick, she felt her magic slip from her grasp as if he’d pulled the rug from under her feet. It  _ hurt _ , having her magic pulled from her, and she pulled back with all her will to keep it from escaping into whatever magical trinket he was keeping in his pocket. He stared at her like he’d never seen anyone quite like her before, and the magical tug-of-war ended. She felt her magic slip back under her skin, under her control, and glared at him defiantly. “Killian,” he said finally. “If it makes you feel any better, we can trade names. Mine’s Killian.”

She kept glaring, unsure if this was some kind of Dark One trick; she didn’t know a lot about this particular Dark One, but she knew his predecessors weren’t afraid of using any sort of trickery to get what they wanted. “What do you  _ want _ , Dark One?”

“Your name. And to know why someone so powerful as yourself has crossed into my domain.”

“That’s easy enough. I’m traveling.”

His eyes glinted, clearly aware she continued to dodge the question of her name. “Traveling where? And for what?”

She shrugged. “Nowhere. Everywhere.”

She felt a tendril of his magic reach out to probe hers again and she pushed it back, fixing him with a steely gaze again. The Dark One -- Killian -- regarded her again. “Your magic walks a fine line between darkness and light, a line I find interesting. The depths of the darkness you’re capable of -- and the strength of the light -- should have most of the realm after you. Is this why you travel to places like ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’?” he asked, his tone mocking as he threw her answers back in her face.

“Maybe.”

“Not very forthcoming, are you?”

“With strange evil wizards who let themselves into my room? Why should I be?”

In a flash of red smoke, he was in her face again, nose brushing up against hers. She could feel his breath on her cheek when he spoke, “Because I may be the only one capable of helping you.”

She put her hands on his chest and shoved, but he didn’t budge. “Why do I need help?”

A slow grin stretched his lips, making crow’s feet around his eyes, but it did little to soften him or reassure her. “There’s darkness in you, little witch, and I sense trepidation where it’s concerned. You want the light, but don’t know how to reach it. You fear the dark, yet you’ve dabbled in it. Who taught you darkness?”

She found she couldn’t look away from his eyes, intense and oh so blue. She wondered if he could simply hold someone with his stare like this, or if there was something else at play, the same something that forced the words from her mouth, “Mother. Not my real mother, the… woman who took me.”

He blinked and she could look away, though she did so only briefly. “What happened to her? If she’d already taken you as a prize, I’d be sure she wouldn’t let you slip away so easily.”

Her throat worked but she couldn’t bring herself to admit it. Her gaze dropped to the floor, staring at the way her feet fit neatly between his wide stance. “You killed her, didn’t you?” 

She nodded.

“No controller, but no protector either. You’ve been running ever since.”

Another nod.

“Did you want to?”

She hesitated. She’s thought for years about this very question. Had she wanted to kill Mother, or had it just been some kind of unfortunate accident? Her powers slipping out of her control, spiraling from her own frustrations and fears, directed at the one person who’d sparked those feelings for her entire life?

Did she want to? Maybe, in some small, dark part of her heart.

Maybe not such a small, dark part anymore.

She met his gaze again, unsure, and an unreadable flicker of emotions crossed his face as he considered her nonanswer to his question. “Emma,” she whispered. “My name is Emma.”

* * *

Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a woman. This happens often enough, you see, but this particular woman was already married. But she was desperately unhappy in her marriage and begged the man to take her away; the man happened to be a pirate, renowned and feared across the seven seas, but the man also believed in good form, and carried on with ideas of dashing rescues and the like -- what could be more dashing a rescue than a woman trapped with a man she described as a monster?

What the man didn’t know, however, was that the monster was more than what he appeared.

The monster killed her, this woman they both claimed to love, and the man swore revenge as he buried her at the bottom of the sea. He left that very day to find the tools to enact his revenge, stopping time itself while he laid out his plans. And it took years more before he finally succeeded, swiping the blade that was the key to the monster’s power and taking it for his own.

The blade  _ and  _ the power.

To kill the monster was to make a monster of yourself, for the power of the Dark One could only pass on to whoever slayed their predecessor. It was a terrible price to pay, but the man was too far gone into his hate and drive for revenge to care much for what happened to him next.

The power of the Dark One buzzed in his ears for decades. He locked himself away in a castle -- he may have killed the previous owners, he couldn’t remember now -- drinking himself into a stupor to quiet the voices in his head telling him how to use the darkness to his advantage. Darkness had taken the woman he loved from him, and for all he cared it could drown with her at the bottom of the sea.

Time moved differently when one was functionally immortal, he discovered, and spending most of that time drunk made it nearly impossible to tell what century it was. Occasionally he woke out of his stupor to find blood on his hands or entrails in the entryway, with no memory of how any of it got there. But the voices of the darkness whispered in his ears still and he found himself wondering if the darkness just took hold, using his body as some sort of vessel to carry out its desires.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

By the time Emma found her way into his castle, he mostly had himself under control. He’d spent years actually reading the tomes that had found their way into his collection, learning to set defenses like invisible glass walls between himself and the darkness, meditating to quiet the voices in his mind. He drank less, though it became increasingly clear that awareness of the passage of time was incredibly  _ boring _ . Immortality and having no clear purpose of what to do with that time was terribly dull, and when the boredom became insufferable he would drink again, only to find himself with the same problem as before. The fragile glass that made up his protective walls was shattered every time, the darkness flowing through his defenses and dragging him down further each and every time. There were fewer mysterious body parts strewn about after these blackout periods, less blood on his hands, but sometimes treasure would find its way into his possession and he had no idea where it came from.

_ Once a pirate, always a pirate _ , the darkness would taunt, until he slammed up his defenses and shut the darkness out again.

Keeping the darkness at bay proved to be more difficult as he introduced Emma to his books on light magic. The taunts grew louder and more frequent and he found comforts at the bottom of a bottle four nights in seven. Even Emma noticed something was off with his manner, seeing as how they were the only two living creatures in the castle. After a month of him disappearing in these blackout rages, she confronted him after their lessons. “Is it me?” she asked pointedly. “Do I drive you to drink and run off somewhere? Do I need to leave?”

“No,” he said hoarsely. “Yes. I don’t know.”

“Are those answers to my questions, or is it a general statement of incompetence?”

He glared at her, the darkness whispering in his ear to silence her smart mouth permanently. “You walk a fine line, little witch.”

“Silence me then,” she said, shoving herself up in his face. “Do it. I know you can, you just haven’t yet -- I’ve seen the mess you leave when you come back. Is this your normal thing or is it just too much to be in the same fucking castle as me?”

She was right, he realized. He could kill her, but something kept him from doing so, even when he was in one of his rages. That was curious -- clearly he had no problem doing away with whatever was bothering him, but even though  _ she  _ was what brought the darkness out  _ she  _ was never the target of his ire.

Curiouser and curiouser.

“No,” he said finally. “This is something that requires… meditation, I think. And perhaps a change in your lessons.”

He would keep her from the books containing only light magic, that was all. The darkness whispered in his mind that she could be a power to rival his own, a terrible and beautiful queen at his side, if he would show her the books with the blackest of magics, but he didn’t want that. The darkness in him hated and feared her potential for light, but it was something else that drew him to her, like a moth to a candle. She wasn’t wholly tarnished, not like him, but she knew the taste of villainy and what it could do.

_ What do you plan to do with her? _ the darkness hissed, the evil imp always lurking over his shoulder. He paced in what amounted to his study, the sky full of stars and Emma slumbering somewhere below in the castle. It wanted to take her and twist her, but he refused to allow it.

For the first time in years, Killian spoke aloud to his demons. “I don’t plan to do anything. She gets what I never had in all of this: a choice.”

* * *

Once upon a time, a young woman lived in a castle. This wasn’t the castle of her birth, but it was a castle all the same -- drafty and enormous, far too many rooms for the only two people living in it, and full of secrets. She found many of these secrets on accident: hidden passageways, libraries full of cobweb-covered books, a treasure room full of magical artifacts that made her magic itch under her skin. Some secrets were laid in the open but never talked about: the blood on the doorstep most mornings, the hand she found in the kitchen, a collection of ears in a chest.

This should have, and would have, frightened any number of normal young women, but Emma was far from a normal young woman anymore.

She knew he was the Dark One, so finding collections of strange, arcane objects and evidence of dark doings wasn’t as outrageous as it may have been. Killian treated her well and never made threats against her -- outside of arguments, where she gave as good as she got and was rewarded with an amused smirk -- so she never felt unsafe in his presence, but the way he seemed to drink heavily and return with more strange talismans and more blood left around the castle after their lessons did bother her. If she was the cause of all this rage and theft and dark magic, why wasn’t he taking it out on her?

She shouldn’t be asking why she was still alive, but the thought nagged at her all the same.

Mother had always drilled into her to expect the worst in people, after all.

But even confronting him didn’t give her any answers, only a change in what she was given to study. Light magic left her feeling odd, like her head was stuffed with cotton and her limbs tingled like she’d touched something metal after walking on carpets in winter. It wasn’t worse than the feelings she’d had when Mother made her cast dark spells, but it still didn’t quite sit well with her. “Not a light witch or a dark wizard, just… something dull and gray in between,” Emma muttered one night, flipping a page and squinting to read the writing by the light of her candle.

“Hardly dull, sadly.”

It was Killian’s voice, but there was something different about it. She turned in her chair and he leaned against the window. He looked terrible, sallow and hollow-eyed in the candlelight, his hair matted down as if he’d been sweating through a fever. He grinned and it was unnerving, lips stretched a bit too wide and showing a few too many teeth. His skin even glistened in the light, making her wonder if he really was feverish -- could Dark Ones get sick? “He  _ likes  _ you,” he said, and again she tried to pinpoint what was different about his voice. “That’s the only thing keeping us from slitting your throat when you sleep -- no, that’s far too easy, we like to watch people  _ squirm _ . You’d shriek, wouldn’t you? Beg for mercy, offer us whatever we like if only we’d let you live?”

There were multiple tones in his voice -- a deep baritone cracking over words, a high-pitched giggle trilling at the end of a question, a cold feminine rasp. This isn’t him, she realized. “Is this what you do?” she asked. “Take him over like he’s some kind of puppet and whisper scary bedtime stories?”

The Dark One moved so fast it was like a blur, hovering over her and pressing her back in her chair, and this close she could see the manic look in his eyes, the pinpricks his pupils had shrunk to, the redness and the deep purple splotches under his skin. “He’s  _ weak _ ,” they rasped -- and it had to be the voices of Dark Ones past, that’s what Mother had said, right? No one could truly kill the Dark One, only take on the mantle of all who came before? “He refuses to act as he should, dabbling in training a witch like you in light magic. He could be powerful and feared but he locks himself away like--”

“Like a terrible thing that needs to be locked away?” Emma snapped, pushing him -- them -- away. “I haven’t heard of anything as bad as the last Dark One, so apparently he’s doing a good job of that. You’re just mad you don’t get to run as free as you want, you’re like a dog tied up at the market--”

Pinned to the wall by the hand to her throat, the rest of her taunt died as she struggled to breathe. Her feet couldn’t touch the floor and she wrapped her hands around his wrist in futility. “K--Kil--”

The wicked snarl on his face only widened and for the first time she felt true fear around him. “Killian--”

His face twitched and his features relaxed into something less feral, his eyes returning to normal, then widened in shock and fear before he pulled away, letting her drop to the floor. Emma gasped, pulling in air until her chest hurt, and coughed to clear the tightness lingering around her neck. She saw his boots shuffle backwards, and then a swirl of red smoke signaled his departure, leaving her to process what had happened.

Alone.

* * *

Once upon a time, a man slew a monster, only to become a monster himself.

The darkness loved to play with his mind, replaying the deaths of those he loved most over and over in his memories, twisting them and making them worse than even the horrible truth had been. He saw Liam’s skin crack open and bleed black blood, darkness seeping out of his nostrils and the gurgling sounds of a man drowning in his own blood so real that Killian was no longer sure if he’d only died of dreamshade poisoning and a stopped heart. He saw  _ himself  _ ripping Milah’s heart from her chest and crushing it, watching her collapse lifeless onto the deck of his old ship -- worse was knowing that the previous Dark Ones shared his mind and this was entirely likely to be a true memory with his own face plastered over Rumplestiltskin’s. But there were other nights when he was treated to visions of abusing the power one had over possessing another’s heart, taking possession of her mind and her body. He didn’t know if someone could be killed while their heart remained whole and outside of their body, but the darkness showed him all the ways it could have made Milah walk willingly into her own death, by her own hand or others.

Once, Emma commented that he looked feverish all the time, like he was overheated and needed a cool bath. Dark Ones were hardly bothered by something as simple as the temperature, but the worst fates that could be laid upon those he’d once loved were enough to give even the most mortal of men the sweats.

Waking from his latest plunge into the darkness, seeing Emma fearful of him and being crushed by his own hand? He was willing to walk into a thousand fiery deaths if only to make up for the terrified look on her face.

He stayed away from her for a time; she didn’t leave, which was curious, but he saw her in his scrying bowl in the library, her head bent over her books and purpling marks around her neck.

He hated the sight of that. She had such a lovely neck, she --

_ You like her _ , the darkness had whispered, weeks before, and he’d vehemently denied it. He was interested in what she could become, that was all, and it was to his advantage at the time to indebt her to him. But she had a choice now, he’d promised himself. He’d freed her of the debt she never knew she’d had, removed the price of learning.

The darkness liked exacting payment from people. Was that why it had acted out, taking over in his moments of weakness, hurting her?

She was still in the library later when he slipped in, his hand in his pocket. She looked up when his footsteps grew near and it was a small comfort that she didn’t cower away from his approach. “You look better,” she commented.

“You don’t,” he said, and went behind her, draping his gift around her neck.

The diamond necklace had arrived in his treasury as most things did: with no knowledge or history of how it got there, only his bloody hand and hook and the scent of expensive perfume lingering on his clothes. But diamonds, like all gemstones, held magic well and the sheer number of them would do wonders to speed up the healing spell he’d placed on it. Emma’s hands went to it, automatically holding the chains in place as he looped them around her neck and used a bit of magic to help close the clasp. Stepping back, he noted with pleasure that the bruises were already starting to fade. 

She conjured a mirror to see the full effect and he noted how easily the magic was done; when she’d arrived, she couldn’t even conjure sugar for her tea, but this was more solid, more real, and easily broken if done incorrectly. “You’ve improved immensely,” he murmured, watching her admire the jewelry and the healing effects.

“I had a good teacher,” she said, her voice just as low.

“Emma, about the other night…”

“Don’t. I know it wasn’t you,” she said, catching his reflection’s eye.

“It doesn’t make it right,” he said. “I apologize, for harming you as well as frightening you. I…”

She shook her head. “It’s… well, we can move past it. It was something beyond your control.”

Fury built in his chest, not at her but at the circumstances of her life that made her shrug away a brush with death. He could have killed her, the power at his fingertips -- the power controlling his fingertips --  _ should  _ have killed her, but something in her had broken through and found him drowning in the depths. “No, Emma,” he snapped, making her look back at him. “The darkness is afraid of you.”

“Me?” she asked, surprised.

“You. You’re… different. It’s… it doesn’t like to be challenged, only obeyed. I have been a consistent thorn in its side, refusing to do as it wants or follow orders.” He felt like he bled these words out, the darkness ripping at his defenses to keep him silent, keep him from spilling its secrets to this woman it feared so much. “It’s particularly damaging when my defenses are down, or when it can break through them. I don’t remember where I go or what I do, though I have an idea. I’m weak, especially susceptible to its control, and your challenge only made it… worse.”

“So it is my fault,” Emma said softly.

He turned her chair and knelt before her, looking at her properly for the first time in days. “No,” he said earnestly. “You… you frighten it, which is enough of a miracle on its own. It’s not your fault I was weak, that I couldn’t control it. I’d wondered why it hadn’t led me to kill you if it was so frightened of you. And I wonder still, but I believe the other night was because I refuse to let it indebt you to me when you’ve completed your training.”

He watched a thousand emotions cross her face; she’d told him how she’d grown up, enslaved to the woman she’d called Mother with fear tactics and the threat of being controlled by others for her magic. He refused to be one of the monsters in her childhood nightmares, chaining her and claiming her, using her as the darkness saw fit -- just as he’d hidden the dagger that bore his name, refusing to let others chain and claim him to be used as his jailer saw fit.

He knew what it was like to have the threat of freedom stolen from under you and refused to allow her the same fears.

“It’s afraid of me?” she asked, and he wondered when she’d taken his hand in her own; she squeezed as a flicker of wonder and fear crossed her face.

“Terrified. I don’t… I don’t know how well I can control it, but it’s why I changed your learning around. It was worse with the light magic.”

She looked away. “I see… and it would probably like it if I did more dark magic, but I can’t stand the feeling of dark magic.”

_ She’d like it more if she practiced more _ , the darkness whispered in his mind, and he wondered how often that her mother had the same thought. He gripped her hand tighter as he slammed his defenses back up, imagining a wall of glass three feet thick between himself and the demons taunting him. “You don’t have to do more dark magic. You don’t have to do anything to appease the darkness, Emma, that’s my burden to bear. In fact --” The idea struck him so suddenly that he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. It wasn’t as if he’d formed a particular attachment to the place, and there were enough enchantments to keep it running that she would hardly notice if he’d left. “Perhaps I should be the one to leave. There are enough learning tools here to keep you busy until you feel ready to move on. You’ve been doing well on your own with the magics I can’t do, and you’re surer of yourself than you were when you came here. I can spell a few rooms to make them safe to practice in without causing havoc across the countryside.”

The more he spoke, the better an idea it became. He would leave the castle to her, let her practice and perhaps visit the port enough to reassure them the Dark One was truly gone. He knew the town suffered a bit from trade from his presence, but the threat of him had also kept the peace so no one seemed to mind all that much. Perhaps she’d simply stay, take over as the lady of the land. She’d do good here, not some insufferable white witch like those blasted fairies, but not a terrible dark queen like his demons wanted her to become -- a real person who understood there needed to be balance.

“Killian.” Emma’s voice brought him out of his thoughts, and he noticed the confusion in her eyes. “What are you saying, that you’d give up your home for me?”

“Well, more that I’d give it to you, let you--”

Whatever he’d been planning to say next died in his throat as she leaned forward and kissed him, and for the first time in a very long time all of the voices that haunted him fell silent. He felt  _ normal _ , with no looming darkness in the back of his mind making him feel like he needed to keep looking over his shoulder, keep running, keep doing something to keep the darkness from swallowing him whole.

Like there was a light at the end of the long, dark tunnel of his life.

She started to pull away and he realized he’d done nothing but let her kiss him with no reciprocation. Well, that simply won’t do, he thought, and for once there was no response from anyone else except himself: I need to kiss her again.

And so he reached for that light, meeting her lips again, and feeling like her shine could ward even the darkest of his nightmares away.

* * *

Once upon a time, darkness descended from a castle tucked away, and brought light to a town by the sea. The traveling magic maid, it seemed, had staked her claim, though to what exactly the townsfolk were never quite sure. No longer did she dabble in tricks of her trade: instead, they found her hands pressed against the earth, against feverish skin and splinted limbs. She disappeared each night, back to the castle where darkness lurked, but returned each morning with a smile and a will to continue her work. What to make of her, they hardly knew, but it was the pirates, in the end, that brought shadows on the heels of her light.

Rarely had the Dark One been seen in all the years he’d festered in the castle up the way, but down he came, in answer to the maid’s call, a raging force stronger than any sea. The townsfolk stuck to the shadows while he made quick work of the pirates, trading murmured words when the maid removed her cloak and made to follow. Light turned to dark, turned water red at port, and only when the screams were silenced and their hands met did the magic in the air fizzle into something altogether gray.

The blood didn’t seem to bother her, the maid, and it went hardly noticed by the Dark One as a heavy mist crept into town, his teeth gritted all the while muttering about  _ bad form _ . The maid only leaned in close, her hand on his cheek and an almost peaceful calm on his face at her touch; she whispered something that may have sounded something like  _ home _ , and the red followed them up in a cloud of smoke.

And when the next dawn broke, the maid returned, with the same beatific smile on her face as always, and went back to her work keeping all but the worst darkness at bay.


End file.
